The Bliss Factor (3 page)

“I’ve missed you, Sunny.”

“It’s Rae, remember?” she said, avoiding the hand that lifted, not to smooth her hair, but to pull at the clip holding it in the sleek bun.

Some children would find it refreshing to have a mother who pushed them to be a free spirit, but Rae had always craved structure. And so she’d rebelled, if you could call it rebellion to refuse to picket and protest. She’d changed her name, for starters. Sunshine Bliss just didn’t suit her. Rae Blissfield was steady and dependable, some might add closed off to that list, maybe even a little repressed and straitlaced. But if other people wanted to label her that was their problem. Rae knew who she was. She’d
chosen
who she was. How many people could say that?

“I like my hair up,” she said.

“You have such beautiful hair.”

Rae made a face and changed the subject. “Why did you call, Mom?”

Her mother sighed, backing out of the bathroom. Rae followed her down the hallway into the kitchen, even more cramped with three adults crowded into it. Annie stopped by the door, Rae perched on the edge of the bench seat curving round three sides of the table, and her father leaned back against the tiny galley sink, smiling at the two of them falling into the same old routine. And since routine was her thing, how could Rae be angry about it?

“You would have come to visit anyway,” Annie said.

“Yes, but you wanted me here
today
.”

“Just tell her,” Nelson said.

Rae frowned when Annie stayed uncharacteristically silent. “You know you can tell me anything,” she said. “I mean, we have our moments, but . . . you’re my mom.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that because I have a pretty big favor to ask.”

“That’s an understatement,” Nelson muttered.

The look Annie shot in his direction had him doing an I’m-staying-out-of-it routine—one-shouldered shrug, hands and eyebrows raised, little take-it-away gesture. Annie might be wearing a dress but her status in the marriage was undisputed.

“I was wondering if a friend of ours could stay with you for a little while,” she said to Rae.

“Why?”

“Because we asked for your help.”

“For whom?”

“A friend,” her mother repeated with a bit of an edge to her voice.

“How long?”

“All these questions,” Annie said huffily. “I thought you were an accountant, not a journalist.”

“I’m being asked to take in a complete stranger. It would be nice to have a little information before I make a decision.”

“You know
us
,” Annie said, sounding and looking hurt.

Rae refused to be manipulated. “I know you, Mom, but I’m not you. I can’t jump first and ask questions later.”

Annie threw up her hands. “Here we go. First you insult me, and next I’ll have to hear how horrible your childhood was.”

Rae looked to her father, staying carefully neutral, then back to her mother. Her first impulse was to defend herself, but that would only take her somewhere she didn’t want to go. Her mother might be unconventional, but she used guilt as well as any churchgoing Catholic. One minute Rae would be giving reassurances and professing her love, the next she’d be agreeing to take in this
friend
of theirs, no questions asked.

“Who is it?” she asked again. “Why do I need to take him or her in, and for how long?”

Annie dropped the theatrics, pressing her lips together for a second before smiling slightly. “You’re determined to ruin my fun, aren’t you?”

“Fun?”

“I only get to mother you once a year. I was trying to fit it all in.”

Rae had to smile over that. “I’ll consider myself mothered.”

Annie kissed her on the forehead. “Now you can consider yourself mothered.”

Even though Rae was savoring that moment of accord she knew there was some misdirection and manipulation involved, too. “Why can’t this friend of yours stay with you?”

“The trailer isn’t that big, and three’s a crowd,” her father said, winking at her mother.

Rae grimaced, as much for the heat rushing into her cheeks as the
ewwwww
factor. She ought to be past the my-parents-have-sex revulsion. Or maybe a child never got past it, no matter how old they were. “It’s just not a good time,” she said, getting back to the real problem. “I’m up for partner.”

“You’re always up for partner,” Annie said, “and that putz of a boss of yours will never give it to you until you stand up for yourself.”

“I can handle Mr. Putz—Mr. Putnam,” she amended before she started to think of him as Mr. Putz and stood a chance of slipping and actually calling him Mr. Putz to his face because she became pretty absentminded when she was deep into someone else’s finances. “You take care of your stray.”

“It’s life or death—”

“Mom,” she said, making it a three-syllable verbal eye roll.

Annie toned down the drama, but she made up for it with sincerity. Very intense sincerity. She took both her daughter’s hands, squeezing them for emphasis. “He’s special, Sunny.”

A man then, that made things a bit uncomfortable. “I’m not sure—”

“He’s perfectly safe. We’ve known him for . . .”

“What?” she asked when her mother stopped to calculate the time. “A few weeks? You’re probably lucky he hasn’t killed you in your sleep.”

“Three, no four months. And he’s not the first young man we’ve taken under our wings.”

“No, he’s not. You took in strays my whole life, and you were lucky you never got tied up with a bad one.”

“Do you think it was just luck?” Annie demanded “That we would have let anyone near you we weren’t sure of?”

“No,” Rae mumbled, eyes dropping to her lap.

Her mother cupped her cheek. “If I’d had any idea you were frightened, that you didn’t feel safe . . .”

It was worse than that, Rae thought. She’d felt she wasn’t enough for them, that she was a disappointment or they wouldn’t have needed someone else to look after.

“We didn’t need luck,” Nelson said, his calm voice giving more weight to that reassurance than all her mother’s impassioned pleas. “Good and bad, there’s nothing more basic, Sunny, and we learned early on to tell the one from the other, even through camouflage. Life on the road teaches you that quickly or you don’t survive it.”

Rae knew that, and looking back she could see they’d known, somehow, who to trust and who not to. Annie and Nelson Bliss had always been willing to lend a hand to someone deserving, but there’d been times when she was a child when they’d run across someone who’d asked for their help, and help wasn’t given. “I really wish I could give you a hand, but it’s such a bad time . . .”

“It’s only for a few days,” Annie said, “maybe a week, tops.”

A week, she thought, just any week for her parents, but the end of the quarter for her, culminating with the partnership meeting at her firm.

“His name is Connor Larkin,” Nelson said. “He’s a perfect gentleman. Very chivalrous, as a matter of fact.”

Her parents both laughed.

“Care to let me in on the joke?”

Annie opened the door. “Come in, Conn.”

And in he walked, all six and a half feet of him, dark hair waving back from that rugged, almost-handsome face, still wearing leather accessorized by a bandage with a slight seep of blood showing through. Instead of setting off alarm bells, it just seemed to add to the . . . okay, dashing figure he cut.

He stopped just inside the door, as surprised as she was. He recovered in seconds, though, giving her a bow and a flourish while she sat there staring, open-mouthed, heart pounding, nerves throbbing in places that hadn’t throbbed since . . . an hour ago, when he’d kissed her. Before that it had been a long time. A really long time. Too long, if she was throbbing over a man who chose to live his life as an historical anachronism.

“Milady,” he said as he straightened, returning her stare with an irreverent grin. “A pleasure to . . . see you again.”

Those sparkling blue eyes dropped to her mouth, her face heated to roughly the temperature of the sun, and she was on her feet, even before she’d formed the intent and despite her suddenly wobbly knees.

“You have got to be kidding,” she said to her mother, but her eyes stayed on the man Annie Bliss had called Conn, which was a pretty apt name for him since Rae felt like she’d been had.

And there stood her parents, acting like it was an everyday occurrence to send a man like that to stay with her. Rae tried to work herself around to the door, hands out to ward them all off before they dragged her into their delusion.

“He looks like he can take care of himself,” she said.

He looked like he could take care of her, too. And she had no business thinking about that kiss, not to mention any other surprises he might come up with if she were stupid enough to let him get that close to her again. “He didn’t have any trouble with those two guys earlier. Wait . . .” Her eyes went to the bandage. “That was real, wasn’t it? They actually wanted to kill him?”

“They only had swords,” her father said.

“They only had . . .” She threw up her hands, wondering why it surprised her that she was the only one who found that comment ridiculous. “What if they come after him with guns next time?”

“Guns?” Conn asked. “What is
guns
?”

Rae didn’t move, but her eyes shifted to her mother’s face.

“Oh, by the way,” Annie said with an infuriatingly calm smile. “Conn has amnesia.”

“AMNESIA?” RAE STAGGERED BACK TWO STEPS
and dropped onto the hard bench seat. Her gaze went to Conn again, still smirking at her but with no sign of prevarication on his face, then to her father, smiling reassuringly.

Annie just looked smug. Rae hated smug. It was the expression she’d seen every time she lost a fight with her mother, which was every time they’d fought. Except that last time, when she’d walked away for good.

Annie’s smile faltered, as if she, too, were remembering where being right all the time had gotten her. “It’s the way between mothers and daughters,” she said.

“Still reading my mind?”

“Reliving my own childhood,” Annie said.

Rae smiled faintly. “So, let me get this straight, that fight wasn’t staged.”

“No.”

The answer came from Conn, but she kept her eyes on her mother’s face, which,
surprise
, was the safer way to go. “And you want me to take him home with me, so the bad guys will come after me, too?”

“We wouldn’t ask you to take him in if it wasn’t safe.”

True, but her mother’s version of safe and her version of safe were two different things. Annie might choose to think the best of Connor Larkin, but Rae wasn’t getting the warm fuzzies from him.
Volcanic eruption
was too mild a description for what she felt when she looked at Connor Larkin. And then there were the Captain Jack Sparrow wannabes to worry about.

“He really does need your help,” Annie insisted. “He’s not safe here.”

“What makes you think he’ll be safe at my house? Not to mention me?”

“For one thing they weren’t actually trying to kill him,” her father said. “They had plenty of time to finish him off and they didn’t. Second, they won’t know he’s at your house. Or where your house is. Or even who you are.”

“How do you arrive at that conclusion?”

“Because you changed your name, and lived at college for four years before relocating here to get your CPA. Because there’s no way to connect Rae Blissfield with Annie and Nelson Bliss. Your birth certificate isn’t a part of your college record, and I doubt the tiny town where it was registered has converted to electronic record-keeping.”

“It sounds like you’ve thought all this through.” To back her into a corner. “But the people you travel with—”

“None of them will talk.”

She knew her father was right. “But—”

“They’ll just think he took off.”

“They who?”

Annie shrugged. So did Nelson.

Rae steeled herself and turned to Conn. “I don’t suppose you know who’s after you?”

“Brigands,” he said with a perfectly straight face. “Lawless mercenaries.”

“Why do they want to harm you?”

“ ’Tis a mystery, milady.” But he grinned. “Perhaps my skill with the gentler sex annoys them.”

She rolled her eyes. “Cut the Knights of the Roundtable act.”

He drew himself up, as far as he could with a low ceiling cramping his style. “I am not a knight, I am an armorer, and far superior as my skill with a hammer and forge protects their very lives.”

“O-kay.” Rae got to her feet, her father headed her off before she could try for the door again.

He shooed her down the narrow hallway, crowding her back so she had nowhere to go but into the bedroom at the end of the RV. Rae managed to completely ignore the rumpled double bed.

“You told me he had amnesia,” she said, keeping her voice down and shooting King Arthur’s tailor a quick glance over her father’s shoulder to make sure he couldn’t hear them. “This guy is delusional. He thinks he’s actually from the Middle Ages.”

“Rae—”

“Either he’s crazy or he’s doing it to tick me off, which, since he wants my help, is not very smart.”

“It’s not an act,” Nelson insisted in a harsh whisper. “Somebody whacked him over the head about a week ago, hard. The blow would have killed anyone else.”

“I’m not surprised. He strikes me as a guy with a hard head.” But she stopped trying to get by her father, and he relaxed, too.

“When he woke up, he thought he actually was an armorer.”

“As in sixteenth-century England, indentured-to-the-lord-of-the-castle armorer?”

“Yep.”

“He doesn’t have an English accent.”

“Neither does anyone else.”

Right, so he thought he didn’t have an accent at all. That actually made sense. In an alternate universe sort of way. “There aren’t any castles, let alone lords,” Rae said, “and people don’t ride horses or wear period dress—well, normal people.”